Long, chaotic vanila AV battles were my favorite part of the game. If that's an option, I'd play. 2 hour battles in which Lok and Ivus are summoned? I'm in.

2 hours wasn't long. Long was joining an AV on Friday, before work, playing for an hour, going to work, coming back from work and joining the exact same AV instance you were in 8 hours ago because the game still hadn't finished, playing for another 2 or 3 hours, going to bed, waking up for Saturday gaming and having a guildie tell you that that same AV game you joined like, 18 hours ago was still fucking going. Old school AV was just something else entirely. Goddamned awesome barely does it justice.

The weird thing is gonna be everyone going back to Vanilla even with its shitty systems and finding out how simple the old raids are compared to even stuff from Wrath.

People are gonna clear all of Molten Core in like 15 minutes.

Only after they spend a month farming fire resistance gear. Also, I am not sure it will be as easy as you think. The transition back to 40 man raiding, will be jarring for pretty much anyone who started after they were phazed out. Despite what people think, adding 15 more people to raid environment based around spatial awareness and not standing too close to other people does add an element of difficulty most people wont handle well. Also, unless there are a lot of kind souls out there willing to re-tool mods to make sure they are game ready, shit like decursing 40 man raids on Lucifron will make most people used to modern raid mechanics cry tears of blood.

What will be more amusing will be watching the 1% repeat itself, as Naxx 40 as level 60 current content will still be brutally fucking hard. I remember running / participating in Naxx 40 pugs after TBC released, and even with the huge jump in hp and DPS, the mechanics of some of those fights could still crush pugs who thought they were just going to go in and stomp the place.

problem with releasing a 1.12 server as the base model is that there were SOOOO many balance and related changes made between that and launch that it would be like playing a completely different game right from day one. Raids like Molten core would be significantly easier than they were when first attempted purely based on class balance tweaks alone, never mind the addition of things like spellpower to gear that originally didn't have it. Sure, you could lock a lot of stuff behind time gates, but there would be a huge host of things that you really couldn't that would still dramatically change the feel of the experience.

That's a very good point. I remember them adding some blues and PvP gear that were better than even Tier 2 so would make those raids very trivial. The more I think about what they will do, the less clear of what I think the solution would be. Has a game developer ever done this with an MMO ? It seems like you won't be able to please everyone by a long shot. The game changed so much during those first 2 years, what would be an authentic recreation of that experience ?

edit: also what about addons ? I mean you used to be able to play Peggle INSIDE the game, how is that going to work ? Also some addons could almost play the game for you back then.

Sometimes the past is best kept in the past. Vanilla WoW was great when it released (and eventually fixed by a series of 'miracle patches'). I can't imagine going through that again... especially when I already know what to expect.

"Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."

In a fantasy world where my opinion somehow influenced Blizzard decisions, I'd suggest focusing less on the "vanilla" aspect and just making it as weird and janky as you can. Contrast it to the live game, don't just build the game to please people who think the game peaked at 1.0

Like, bring back the weird class mechanics: warlock soulstones, rogues with their million different thief skills which all had to be leveled separately, hunters with... everything. Get rid of Horde paladins and Alliance shamans. Bring back the slow combat and wonky loot, all that. Maybe boost XP rates to compensate for it. But go all out with it, you know? Give Tauren plainsrunning, let Undead speak common and be vulnerable to "Shackle Undead," throw in all that weird stuff that never made it out of beta. Because I don't particularly give a shit if the game accurately simulates the experience I already played thirteen years ago, I care if it's interesting today, and I do think there are some interesting mechanics that have been sheared off as the game has gotten more and more streamlined over the years that I wouldn't mind messing around with. I just don't care about the specifics of how accurate a historical recreation it is or anything. Because it's never going to be the same, this is a social game and my social circle is not going to leap back in to this no matter what they do.

I dunno, maybe I don't represent the majority here. But I suspect that Blizzard doesn't really know what the majority wants, they just hear "vanilla servers plz" a million times and the boss says they have to make it happen even though they don't really get the appeal themselves. The cynical part of me says that the few peeps of information I've heard have left me feeling like there are people involved in this who WANT it to fail, like they kind of take the demand for older versions as a criticism of the newer one, so they are intentionally tossing out a crap version of the game so that when people whine about getting stuck in their mining animation the devs can fold their arms smugly and say "nonono, this is what you said you wanted, this is what you ALL SAID was SO MUCH BETTER THAN OUR VERSION" as it all collapses just like they predicted it would.

I'm sure there will be calls for a Classic PvP server as well, considering the changes they're making in the next expansion. So that'll at least filter out the douches that just prey on the weak/leveling crowd.

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild

Now, of course it's not as simple as that, but I would imagine "Vanilla" could be interpreted as the last big patch before the event leading to The Burning Crusade. We're talking about Patch 1.12.0 (and 1.12.1):

I doubt they'll add an LFG tool or new races. I think they should start on 1.12 with certain things (Dire Maul, Silithus quests, AD armaments) disabled and a progressive release schedule. There were a lot of class reworks throughout the expansion that I think most people would prefer to be in the game at launch. Same with battlegrounds.

It won't be an authentic vanilla experience unless you get to bomb your local AH with Barron Geddon'd pets, train Kazzak to Stormwind (and then 1 shot him with a reckoning bomb) and start a plague outbreak in orgrimmar by hearthing out of the Hakkar fight. Every patch in the progression should be properly represented, complete with all the bugs too. If they did that, I would be all over it, purely for the ability to abuse the shit out of plenty of hilarious bugs that were broken as fuck.

It won't be an authentic vanilla experience unless you get to bomb your local AH with Barron Geddon'd pets, train Kazzak to Stormwind (and then 1 shot him with a reckoning bomb) and start a plague outbreak in orgrimmar by hearthing out of the Hakkar fight. Every patch in the progression should be properly represented, complete with all the bugs too. If they did that, I would be all over it, purely for the ability to abuse the shit out of plenty of hilarious bugs that were broken as fuck.

I agree completely. Silly shit like that is at least half of what made Vanilla fun, and if they just do 1.12 with time-gated content it's a half-assed cop out and I won't bother.

I agree completely. Silly shit like that is at least half of what made Vanilla fun, and if they just do 1.12 with time-gated content it's a half-assed cop out and I won't bother.

I don't know how they're supposed to recreate anything you're talking about. The Hakkar thing was fixed extremely quickly. So they should leave it in as is, then when someone spreads the plague we uh.. patch it back out again? There'd be no magic there because everybody would know exactly what is happening. I'm not against starting it on 1.0 or whatever patch you want to start on and moving forward, but pretending those weird unintended events will happen the same way again is just silly.

Having played vanilla on a private server within the last couple years, I know for a fact I'll enjoy the game however they decide to release it, but I'd be playing because I actually like the game it was back then, not because of weird unintended events that only made up 0.001% of the vanilla experience rather than "half the fun" it apparently is for other people.

God that argument takes me back...no matter how much the player base cried for LA to get nerfed, no matter how much they tried to make Mercs and BMs competitive, they just couldn't do it until 60+ patches later.

Also, lol @ "it's hardcoded, we can't do it unless one of our competitors do it then we can magically find a way"

"Those lights, combined with the polygamous Nazi mushrooms, will mess you up."

"Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did." -schild

Long, chaotic vanila AV battles were my favorite part of the game. If that's an option, I'd play. 2 hour battles in which Lok and Ivus are summoned? I'm in.

I would subscribe for this.

Ditto. Original AV was probably one of my most favorite things ever.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert